“What are you if fate proves you right and you die knowing you could have kept Quraite alive—kept Urik alive, if that’s what you care about? What happens, happens, Pavek, right? You play the game once, and you play it with your life. Are you brave enough to let Grandmother and the others make up their own minds?”
When the matter was stated that way, in that tone, by a leering dwarf, it really wasn’t a question. A man either took an unhesitating step across the threshold, or a man wasn’t a man at all. And as he wasn’t ready to concede that much he tightened his jaw and entered the hut.
Telhami sat on her sleeping platform, a bowl of tea on her left and Akashia on her right. Other druids—about eight of them, not including Ruari—stood along the walls or sat on the floor with a handful of the farmers among them.
Every face turned toward him, smiled, and greeted him with a name or nod, as if he hadn’t kept them waiting for who knew how long… as if they hadn’t heard the tag-end of his discussion with Yohan. Akashia herself offered him tea. If it had been anyone else, he might have accepted, but he couldn’t meet her eyes or trust himself to take the bowl from her hands without dropping it.
A shadow fell from the doorway to his shoulder: Yohan stood beside him, one hand pressed against his ribs, pushing him forward. He thought—hoped—it was a signal for him to move aside, take a more inconspicuous place in an outside corner. But those hopes died. He took one step, and his shirt tightened as if an inix had clamped its jaw over the cloth.
“Pavek’s ready to talk,” Yohan announced. “Aren’t you, Pavek?”
So he talked, softly at first. Telhami’s face was calm. Her eyes, seemingly focused on some other time and place, were unreadable. Akashia, he discovered after a moment, was no more able to look at him than he’d been able to look at her. But everyone else was staring at him, none more pointedly than Yohan, himself.
He told them about Laq: what he’d seen of its making, how it killed, and then, for no good reason at all, he told them about Zvain.
“He lost his father to that poison—” Never mind that the boy had said the raver wasn’t his father “—and his mother. He’s an orphan now on the streets of Urik. A common person of Urik, one of those you say you’re helping. What good does your zarneeka do him? He can’t afford to buy Ral’s Breath; it can’t cure the emptiness in his life. It won’t protect him from the slavers and worse that haunt Urik’s streets, looking for orphans like him. Picture him in your mind, then ask him how important your precious zarneeka is to him when he’s not going to get Ral’s Breath, he’s just going to have to live with the havoc and destruction Laq wreaks on his world—”
The words stopped flowing as suddenly as they had begun. His voice, which had risen to an impassioned bellow, went quiet His tongue lay lifeless on the floor of his mouth. There wasn’t another mortal sound in the hut. All eyes were on him, even Akashia’s. All mouths gaped silently open, even Telhami’s.
And he realized, as his knees went liquid, that he was not alone. The guardian’s essence had flowed through him, as it flowed through Akashia when she healed or Telhami when she flew invisibly from one part of Quraite to another. The guardian had shaped the words he, himself, had chosen to speak. The guardian had lent him an eloquence and power that could not be ignored.
He tried again to speak, to offer an explanation, an excuse for what had happened, but the guardian was finished with him. Its essence drained away, swirling down his legs like wind and water. Yohan’s fist, still clamped over his shirt, was a necessary support.
“I’m—I’m not—I’m finished,” he stammered before Yohan reeled him in.
“He speaks well for me,” someone whose face Pavek couldn’t see, whose voice he didn’t recognize, announced to the others.
Murmured harmony rippled through the hut, around and behind him, but not in front of him, where neither Telhami nor Akashia appeared pleased.
“You speak well, indeed,” the old woman said with a nod, her cold voice confirming what his eyes had seen. “But your Zvain is not an ordinary citizen of Urik. We cannot